Phoebe Maltz Bovy
A fiercely intelligent, funny, and much-needed reality check on the state of heterosexual women.
The Last Straight Woman is a call to set aside the baggage of what female heterosexuality evokes, in favour of a definition of what it actually entails: women liking men. No more, no less. That a woman is straight implies nothing about how conventional or submissive she is. It does not mean she wants to be accommodating to men generally.
Using that simple definition as its launching point, the book moves to the history of women’s desire for men, and how it is ultimately separate from much of the history of marriage. Phoebe then turns to the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, and to second-wave feminist critiques of heterosexuality—a pattern that repeated itself when early-2000s sex positivity gave way to post-#MeToo reticence. One sees men’s desires pitted against women’s need for safety, with women’s own lusts all but forgotten. She examines the ways everyone from queer theorists to evolutionary psychologists has cast doubt on the authenticity of women’s interest in men, as well as the frustratingly widespread notion that female sexuality is fundamentally about wanting others to find you attractive. She makes sense of a society where many young adults are 2SLGBTQI+ but a lot of the women so identifying lead effectively heterosexual lives. Is it men these women have gone off, or just the confining gender roles associated with being a straight lady?
The Last Straight Woman offers a way forward for straight women. In lieu of the sexy woman men are gazing at, why not be the woman too busy gazing at sexy men to have bothered with her own looks? Phoebe offers not a self-improvement PowerPoint, but rather an assortment of characters from 1990s British sitcoms, a rare world where the frumpy but horny straight lady had her day. She does not demand that 21st century women model themselves after supporting characters from long-forgotten television shows but rather merely consider the possibility that straight women are all one argyle sweater-vest away from true liberation.
